Femina, A Work for Every Woman

by John A. Miller

The use that is being made of electricity in the arts has convinced everybody that it is a most powerful agent, which manifests itself in so many different phenomena that it is as mysterious to-day as it was centuries before Christ, when the Greeks first observed it in amber when rubbed with silk, and from which the term has been derived.

Electricity is developed in bodies from a variety of causes, among which are friction, pressure, chemical action, heat, and magnetism. We are acquainted with it only through the peculiarity of its action, and it behaves as a subtile, imponderable fluid of a compound nature, possessing opposite polarity when excited, giving rise to positive and negative electricities, but when at rest these forces seem to neutralize each other, and as such pervade all matter.

Chemical action is usually the most convenient for obtaining electricity for medicinal purposes, and the arrangement through which this is accomplished is called a cell or battery.

A battery in its simplest construction is made of a plate of zinc and a plate of copper partially immersed in dilute sulphuric acid. A disturbance of the neutral electricity now ensues, and by means of a delicate instrument, it may be observed that the zinc plate possesses a feeble charge of negative and the copper a feeble charge of positive electricity; at the same time there is a slight escape of hydrogen from the surface of the zinc. If now the plates are connected by means of a metallic wire, the chemical action increases and the hydrogen gas is now discharged from the surface of the copper. The wire is now traversed by an electric or voltaic current, which imparts to the connecting wire, thermal, magnetic and other properties.

Apostoli’s method of employing intense galvanic currents without discomfort or injury to the patient.

The internal electrode, which he calls the excitateur intrauterin is held in the hand of the operator. The dispersing electrode covers the abdomen.

The electricity does not, however, correspond to that which was peculiar to the metallic plates before they were connected by the wire, but the opposite electrical conditions discharge themselves from the wire: the direction of the current in the fluid, being from the positive or copper plate to the zinc or negative plate, and vice versa, so that the wire of the zinc plate is now positive, while that of the copper is negative.

Poles and electrodes. The wires or terminals are called the poles of the battery; instead of the term poles, the word electrode is now generally used. From what was said of the origin and direction of the current in the fluid, it is important to remember that the positive electrode or wire is connected to the negative plate, while the negative electrode is connected with the positive plate.